Measuring your email performance is a necessary step in your email marketing journey.

Now that you’ve started sending a series of emails to your customers you’re probably wondering how you can tell if these emails are having any noticeable impact on your business. 

The good news is that there are plenty of ways to measure the performance of these emails in order to gauge their success (or failure) and tweak them as needed in order to increase their success towards your business goals.

Email Performance Metrics

Email tracking is when you monitor the delivery of your email to your intended audience. The most common metrics tracked tend to be if the email was opened and if any of the links inside were clicked. This is done by adding an image pixel to the email that is not visible to the recipient. However, as we have touched on multiple times throughout this guide, recent changes to various email clients have made this method of email tracking to measure performance less reliable than it once was.

If you still wish to track these metrics or work for a company that heavily values them, here are some industry averages that might help you benchmark your own performance.

Open rate: 21.5%
Click rate: 2.3%

[Note: these averages are an overall average across all industries. Campaign Monitor has crunched the numbers and has more detailed breakdowns by industry as well.]

There are additional metrics that will paint a clear picture of the success of your email marketing campaigns with increased accuracy.

Product Goals

Tracking internal product goals are a surefire way to track if your email campaigns are working as intended.‍

Here are some key product goal examples worth tracking:

• Upgrading from a free trial to a paid user

• Inviting a new team member to your account

• Completing your profile in an app

• Sending your first email campaign (in Loops)

• Make a purchase

Regardless of what product goals you plan on tracking, these are tangible actions that will ultimately improve your bottom line and how your users use your product. The importance of prioritizing these over unreliable metrics like open rate can’t be overstated.

Is your audience growing?

Comparing your overall subscriber or customer size over time is a solid way to tell if your email content is resonating with a broader audience.

Is your audience unsubscribing?

Do you see a drop in total subscribers every time you send an email? Are longtime subscribers opting out of receiving future emails? If you see these trends it may be time to reevaluate your current email marketing strategy to ensure you are providing real value to your customers through the communications you are sending.

Are your emails being marked as spam?

Using a service like Sender Score you are able to track how various mailboxes view your emails to see if they will land in spam. If too many of your emails get marked as spam you run the risk of your sending reputation dropping (meaning less emails landing in someone’s primary inbox) as well as your email service provider potentially limiting or blocking your account from sending future emails.

What is the ROI?

This is the metric that truly matters. Are these emails moving your SaaS toward the product goals you outlined earlier in this guide? Whether that is more trial customers, trial to paid conversions, or simply more readers of your publication… are the emails you are sending moving those numbers up and to the right?

As you can see, there are countless email performance metrics that you can and should be tracking as you continue to ramp up email marketing for your SaaS. If you are not reviewing these metrics on a regular basis you run the risk of throwing your marketing resources into an email channel that isn’t performing to its full potential.

Email Performance Reports

Email performance reports provide critical information that measures how well an email campaign has performed. These reports can be as simple or detailed as you ultimately want them to be as long as they are built to provide insights into the effectiveness of your email marketing efforts while helping you identify areas for improvement.

Email performance reports will typically include a range of your typical KPI metrics. Many email sending platforms will provide these for you but you are also able to build out your own dashboards that fully dive into the metrics and the trends that are developing over time. 

• Open rates

• Click-through rates

• Conversion rates

• Bounce rates (hard and soft bounces)

• Spam report rates

• Unsubscribe rates

• Engagement rates

By analyzing these metrics on a consistent basis, email marketers can determine which aspects of their campaigns are working well and which areas need improvement before it is too late.

For example, if open rates are low, marketers may need to focus on improving subject lines or send times. If click-through rates are low, marketers may need to re-evaluate the content or placement of links within the email.

If you neglect these email performance reports and metrics as a whole you run the risk of losing subscribers before you are able to correct course.